The Death of the River

The Death of the River

I never knew how many fish were in the river until they started going belly-up and washing up on shore. The question ‘How many fish do you think are in the river?’ was one of those that kept us well-entertained, along with ‘how far is it to the sun?’ and ‘how many cobs of corn are in that field over there?’. My imagination didn’t stretch that far, of course, but the pleasure was in the guessing. We would lie on the rocks by the river and squint our eyes in concentration, as if the answer was something that we could see, if only we looked at it the right way. I knew that the river, which looked so placid from above, was actually teeming with life. If only I could get somehow below the river and look up, I would be able to count the fish. Sometimes I would imagine exactly that, lying on the bottom of the river, my hair was seaweed as I let out little bluish-green bubbles of breath.
We were only ten years old that summer the river died, passing our spare time mostly by lying on bleached mossy rocks contemplating the mysteries of life. The mysteries were simple then. Would we pass the Math test? What was the best way to sneak out of our houses without our parents noticing? And would the boy/girl we had a crush on ever return our affections? The river swam by us, unmoved by our ponderings, its soft waves occasionally licking our toes. The moss tickled the backs of our legs. The birds called around us. And the sacred, secret forest bound us in on all sides.
The evening when we discovered that the fish were dying was the evening of the community’s end-of-summer festival. The golden coin of the sun was dropping perfectly into a slot on the horizon, payment in full for a beautiful late summer evening, perhaps the last this year. As the light faded, the trees slowly changed in color from green and brown to black, stencils held up against the darkening blue sky. We were having a party in the school playground, and although one couldn’t see the river from there, one could hear it. The sound of the river permeated everywhere in our small village. You could hear it best at night, when the day-sounds had been folded up and put away. The adults were drinking from sparkling glasses full of a blood-red wine , and we were drinking a rare treat of sweet Coca-cola, for which we kept running to our respective parents, begging for re-fills.
I was looking wistfully up at my own mother when I felt a tug at my T-shirt. It was Linda. “Come on. I have to show you something.”
When Linda has something to show me, I drop everything, including the chance to get a glass of bubbly soda, and go with her. It was she who showed me the butterfly with blue wings, the eclipse of the moon, and how boys are able to take a leak standing up.
We walked down the path beyond the schoolyard, her jet black braid bouncing against her faded blue T-shirt . It was a narrow path, one of the lesser-used ones to get to the river, and trees reached out and scraped my arms as we walked passed. We were ducking under branches and jumping over roots, a strange kind of hiking dance that usually sped up in hilarity when we did it after school. But for this walk Linda was uncharacteristically solemn. The path emptied onto the banks so suddenly that I almost tumbled down the slope into the water. Linda’s hold on my upper arm saved me.
“Look,” Linda said, and my eyes followed where her finger pointed.
“Looks like a dead fish,” I commented.
“It is dead. I just spent the last few minutes poking at it. Now, look at the river.”
I looked. The river was flowing along just as it always had been, dark blue in color with flashes of white. Something was wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was. I looked to the trees on the opposite bank, but they gave away no secrets. Then it hit me like a sharp pinch on my neck. My eyes teared up as if I had been struck, and my chin fell on my chest. Flashes of white. Of white. Of white and the sun had already set.
“The river!” I exclaimed, but I couldn’t finish.
The river was full of dead fish. The flashes of white were strangely alike in nature, because these were the elongated triangle-shaped bellies of dead fish.
I saw Linda nod only out of the corner of my eye, because they were surfacing, hundreds of them.
“What is it? What happened?” I asked when I finally recovered my voice.
“I don’t know. Come on, let’s go tell the others.”

From then on, it was ankle-deep dead fish all along the river. The adults, who should have been busy reaping the harvest in the fields, were instead carting wheelbarrows full of slippery, stinking fish to a pit they had dug outside the town limits. But what was really scary was when the fish slowed down their repugnant assault on the banks a week later. When they stopped coming all together was when we knew the river was really dead.
“What will we ever do without the river?” the grandmother demanded of everyone. She was the only one in our village of grandmother-age, so she was everybody’s grandmother. Her job was to know everyone else’s business, to pass out sweets to us children, and to be wise and obscure.
No one answered her.
We were sitting on the grandmother’s porch after school in the slanting light of the oblivious sun.
“Does it really matter?” Dragon asked her, crumbs spilling out of his mouth from the piece of bread he was eating. “So we can’t swim in the river or take its fish. We have enough cows and chickens and pigs. Do we really need a river? What does it mean if we don’t have it?”
“It means everything,” said the grandmother, and she couldn’t look any one of us in the eye. Her depressed manner scared me more than her words. She just continued swaying in her rocking chair, her cheeks puckered inward, her eyes on her lap.
The conversation of adults swarmed around us. Eventually I understood that the river was dead because of a mining accident. Chemicals used in the process of mining gold had leaked out of a plant ten kilometers away and into the river. The plant was run by people who were big and loud and their language was spoken as if their tongue was an obstruction to the act of speaking and not a tool. I didn’t know much about them, but before the accident had happened, people deferred to these foreigners, and spoke of how lovely it was of them to invest in this area and create jobs for the locals. Now, however, the talk of the foreigners took on an ominous tone. It was ‘they’ who had killed our river.



At school, no one could talk about anything else. The group of us who had always played by the river sat in a silent circle.
“We have to have a funeral for the river,” I said.
“You want to bury the river?” Dragon asked. He was big and sarcastic.
“Not a burial. A funeral.”
“Well, if you don’t want to bury it, how can we have a funeral?”
I returned his question with a question. “What do people usually do at funerals?”
“Flowers,” chirped Daniela. “There are usually lots of flowers.”
“And candles,” Sacha said. “People light candles at funerals. The grandmother says that candles light the way to heaven for the dead.”
“Flowers and candles. Good,” Linda said. “And we have to sing. People sing at funerals.”
“You guys are crazy!” Dragon said. “There is no way I’m going to sing at a funeral for a river!”
“So our ears will be spared,” Linda commented, and Dragon flushed red.

We gathered at the bridge over lunchtime. The grandmother, when we had finally confessed what we were up to, had insisted on coming along. She had even changed into a black dress. Dragon eyed her warily, but she smiled at him. “When you’re old, young man, you will understand. The elderly never miss a chance to attend a funeral. They need that reminder that they themselves still live.” Sacha had some matches that he had swiped off his father who had the unusual habit of smoking a pipe. He produced them proudly from his pocket. Keeper of the Fire. I took some slippery buff-colored candles out of a yellow plastic bag with the name of a city-supermarket on it.
“Where did you get those?” Linda asked, fingering a candlewick.
“Beeswax,” I replied. “My mom makes them.”
We each offered up our materials to the God of splintery bridges, spreading everything out in a colorful sacrifice.
“What’s the soap for?” I asked Linda.
“This is special soap. It floats.” She picked up a freakishy blue-green bar, carved a hole in the center with a narrow spoon, and jammed a candle in, the soft wax raking up the side. “There’s one for everybody.” So we claimed our bars of soap, and made them into little lighted boats to the tune of the rumblings from Dragon’s stomach.
“I can’t believe I’m missing my lunch for this,” he whined.
“This is important,” Linda reminded him, and we took our soap and Sacha’s matches and slid down on the still-golden leaves littering the steep bank to the river’s edge. The dead fish had been cleared away by the freshly unemployed miners, but the river radiated death, visible as a black mist hanging over the surface that I could almost see.
I pulled Linda’s sleeve. “You feel it?”
She nodded.
We had to hang over the river at a dangerous angle, soap bars clutched in sweaty hands. This time, a fall into the river wouldn’t be a cause of giggles, splashes and happy taunts, but a cold grave and a headstone for the premature death of a village child. We all felt it. I could see the safety of our rocks across the river, the rocks where we had just this past summer contemplated all the mysteries of our lives, but we couldn’t lean down from there. Too high.
“Light a match, Sacha,” Linda whispered.
Sacha grunted as he held on to a tree root with the crook of his elbow, bar of soap in his mouth, and pack of matches in his hands.
The late October wind blew the first match out and brought me to shivers inside my jacket, which was too light for this sort of weather but I had no other, nor could I realize at that particular moment that such a thing as a thick jacket, or warmth in general, existed. The second match flickered and caught fire. I heard Dragon release his breath. “Give me your candle,” he said to me.
We had all the candles lit and ready to sail.
“What now?” Daniela asked.
“We should sing,” Linda replied.
“This is getting ridiculous!” Dragon exclaimed. “The candles will blow out.”
“Not if we shield them,” she answered. We all joined Sacha hanging from his root, our hands cupped around our candles, our shoes splashed with the toxic mud of the bank. We hung there like strange birds doing weird things, in our jackets that were too thin and our hearts so nakedly earnest. Our breaking hearts full of blue sadness. Never again have I since felt an emotion so real. Linda began to sing, a hymn that I knew from church, although I did not know what it meant. All our voices rose, even Dragon’s, the most tragic and broken of all, carried strong from our throats onto the wind.
“Now,” Linda said, when we had finished singing, “let’s float them. And say a prayer when you do.”
One by one we sailed our small boats in the river. Daniela tossed some violets in, tears running down her cheeks. I let my boat go, being careful not to get any of the splashing poisonous water on my fingertips.
“Let’s go back up to the bridge and watch them sail,” suggested Sacha. So we left our precarious spots with more than a little relief and re-mounted the bridge where the grandmother had stood watching us, her serious eyes unblinking. Some of the ex-miners were sitting up there as well, smoking cigarettes and passing around a few bottles of beer.
“Hey, what you kids up to?” demanded Dragon’s uncle, who had worked at the plant.
“Having a funeral for the river, sir,” Dragon replied, and the miners wandered over to the edge to watch the candles in the water. The black murkiness let no reflection escape.
“Look!” Sacha exclaimed, pointing. Dragon’s boat, so neatly carved as a real boat, was wobbling.
“Looks like your boat is sinking,” I said.
It all happened so fast. Dragon’s bar of soap tipped over on its side. There was a sudden noise, like a great intake of breath, and the river burst into flames. Fire danced on top of the water spreading quickly both upstream and downstream, reaching a height of ankle-length for someone standing on the water. We stood there, our mouths open, speechless.
Dragon’s uncle pulled Dragon up by his ear. “What have you kids done? You’re burning the river!”
In some cultures,” the grandmother said, “It is customary to burn the dead.”